Swedish Left Reluctantly Drops Israel-Hating Party Leader

In Sweden the other day, the worldwide red-green alliance experienced a minor stumble on its lockstep march into the golden future time.

It began last week, when one Omar Mustafa was elected to the governing board of the Social Democrats, Sweden's oldest and largest political party. Mustafa already had an influential position in Swedish society – namely, as head of that nation's Islamic Association. Nowadays, of course, such an appointment isn't exactly remarkable: on the contrary, given the determined, concerted effort throughout Europe to incorporate orthodox Muslim community leaders into higher and higher ranks of the left-wing political establishment, Mustafa's elevation was just one more step along the way.

The problems started, however, when critics started pointing out things about Mustafa that weren't exactly consistent with Social Democratic doctrine. During his tenure at the Islamic Association, for example, he's invited a rogues' gallery of Islamic ideologues to Stockholm to give speeches and participate in conferences. Among them: Egyptian Salah Sultan, who, as Benjamin Weinthal reported in the Jerusalem Post, "claimed on the television channel Al Jazeera that the Jews during Passover committed ritual murder of Christians"; British-Palestinian Azzam Tamimi, who has described Israel as "a cancer"; and Sheik Abdullah Hakim Quick, who has called for the execution of gays. It also turned out that when NATO bombed Libya in 2011, Mustafa tweeted that Sweden should send fighter planes to Israel instead. On Facebook, moreover, Mustafa "liked" the page of Jew-hating Hitler fan Yusuf al-Qaradawi.